When you’re making a mental shift away from legacy, on-prem security thinking, you may be wondering what an effective, modern security solution looks like. You may already know that you should prioritize detection and not focus solely on prevention, but what exactly goes into a best-case intrusion detection solution?

The graphic below should help you understand the five key components of intrusion detection. When considering what types of solutions to invest in, you want to make sure you have all of these bases covered from a technical point of view:

This year’s Cyber Security Summit: Boston was a tremendous success. It was rewarding to see so many business leaders, cyber experts, government officials, and thought leaders in one place, all dedicated to advancing the security of our cyber environment.

The event’s mission is to connect C-Suite and Senior Executives responsible for protecting their companies’ critical infrastructures with innovative solution providers and renowned information security experts.

Parsed out, this meant that the event offered up a lot of valuable insights into the state of cyber security, an exhibit floor filled with leading solution providers demonstrating the latest products and services, and much practical advice on a multitude of security and compliance-related topics.

Threat Stack was honored to be a Gold Sponsor. We were also an exhibitor, and Sam Bisbee, our CSO, was well received for his contribution to one of the main panel discussions.

This conversation sounds all too familiar, right? Your non-production environments are the foundation for the tools, applications, and services you provide to your customers. The history of every code deployment, mistake, and refinement made to create your product can be found there.

While test and dev environments serve a different purpose from production environments, they too, can be open to the outside world and introduce risk if not secured. Chances are, the data you’re storing, analyzing, or processing in non-production environments are just as sensitive as the data you push out to production. So why skimp on security here just because it’s not a production environment?

In the cloud, where there are no perimeters and limitless endpoints, there are many ways attackers can get direct access to your environment if you make the wrong move. Given the speed that companies are moving to and scaling in the cloud, it’s easy to miss a step along the way and leave your business wide open for an attack.

In a recent survey, we found that 73 percent of companies have critical AWS cloud security configurations. Issues like wide open SSH and infrequent software updates are among the top risks identified, and of course, some of the biggest exposures in the recent past (Verizon, Dow Jones, and the RNC) were the result of AWS S3 configuration errors. But there are many others that are more obscure, yet just as dangerous if left unaddressed.

It is very clear by now that the cloud has reached an inflection point. Public cloud investment continues its rapid expansion, driven in large part by business imperatives for speed and scale. Gartner projects 18% cloud growth in 2017, with an increase of 36.8% for IaaS. So, the odds are your company is running at least some of its infrastructure in the public cloud.

Of course, no matter how many benefits it offers, it is often not possible for organizations to make a clean leap to the cloud. Many find themselves with infrastructures that include cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid, on-premise, and containerized environments. So what do you need to do to protect these complex structures?